Heart's Truth
by henriettaline
Summary: After her breakup with Brody, Rachel thinks about her feelings for Finn and the limbo she still finds herself in. Set during late 4x17.


_Just a short thought-piece, set late in 4x17.  
_

_Disclaimer: Don't own Glee, or Journey's Separate Ways, or a few OCs that I've borrowed for Rachel's alternate futures._

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"_Finn came all the way here to do that?"_

Rachel's words still echoed in her mind as she sat on the subway, taking the long train back to Bushwick. She was tired, her day had been long and so draining, but her mind stayed resolutely on that key moment and what she knew from it.

She had been through enough therapy to know the truth of an immediate instinctual reply, and anyway she had felt the truth of it as soon as she heard herself say it. Brody, her boyfriend of the last few months, whom she had been living with for heaven's sake, had told her that her ex-fiancé was responsible for the bruise on his face, from a confrontation, and all she had cared about had been that it meant that Finn really cared enough to defend her, to fight for her. To come here for her, even if he couldn't stay to be with her. Better actually that he hadn't told her, since it meant it was real, not for show.

Yes, she had already been angry with Brody, but – she wasn't concerned either way about how he felt, or even inclined to gloat over the state of his face as serving him right.

_Though it did._

But that hadn't mattered, and still didn't. Nor had she been inclined to talk to him about the dangers of his "job" or it being beneath him or anything like that. Maybe she didn't think it was, not really, or just hadn't thought about it either way. She'd been using him too, to fill her emptiness like the women who paid him did, maybe she should cut him a check.

Rachel snorted, sardonically amused that she could think such things about the man she had thought she was upset about. But the dam was broken now, her feelings flowing clear, and she knew he hadn't really been anything to her. Someone to be with. And attention, attraction, excitement.

_Fireworks._

She groaned. Maybe that was how Finn knew, how he'd been so sure she was lying to herself, because he'd been there too, before. Well maybe then he would understand. And he had seen right through her, through the barriers and distance that she had been trying to keep between them, as she kept pretending to herself that she could move on like she'd been making herself do.

"_You and I both know how this thing ends."_ His eyes so intent on her, his voice intense and sure, even though the twitch of his mouth betrayed the risk he was taking in saying it.

She had so hated that he was right, too, hated the limbo that it put her in. But he was right, she could no longer deny it. As she dozed in her seat, her head leaning against the window as the train rocked her, she saw flashes of futures, her futures. She would become a star, of course, maybe even soon, with _Funny Girl_ coming. Or maybe it would take longer, years of work in minor (_featured_) roles, as understudy, until she finally had her chance to shine, but shine she would. And some night she would be exiting the theater, buoyed by yet another successful performance and the clear adoration of the man on whose arm she was, and there _he_ would be, looking at her from where he stood across the road.

And it all wouldn't matter. Nothing else would matter except that he was finally there.

The man next to her kept changing as she dreamt future after future: Brian her dashing costar, he'd had a reputation among the ladies but he'd given it all up for her; David the lawyer and Bradley the financier, handsome, wealthy, showering her with everything (every _thing_) she could ever want; Tom the composer, sharing a passionate artistic life; Malcolm, the sweet serious engineer she'd met one night at a bar when they'd both been students, and they'd stuck with each other as they pursued their separate dreams and were now planning to start a family; even Jack, the Hollywood actor she'd met on-set of a tv show she'd guest-starred in, who had followed her back to New York.

Slivers of dreams passed by, and the man next to her kept changing. The man across the road never did. Oh he dressed differently, depending on what he'd been doing in all that time he had been apart from her, chasing his need to do something significant to make himself feel like he deserved her. But in any clothes, even out of the corner of her eye she knew him, and as she turned to meet his gaze across the street, the rest of the world fell away. Including whoever it was next to her and anything they'd built as a life together, all vanishing, any meaning in them shredded by the return of the man who had always held her heart.

A sudden shake of the subway car jerked her back into wakefulness. But she knew her visions had been true, at least in what would happen should she go down that path. In some way she had subconsciously chosen Brody as a safe option –

_Safe? Living with a prostitute was 'safe'?_

– at least for her heart, or her conscience. Brody hadn't asked her to fall in love with him, had even tried to hold onto her despite knowing she still loved Finn. She hadn't been able to really connect with him, had treated the sex as an exciting distraction from the ache in her heart that she had tried so hard to deny, and used his presence to ease her loneliness. She had been so needy, she knew that now, desperately needing someone and becoming a hollow version of herself in trying to fill that need and fit what she thought she had to become in New York, but she couldn't really feel guilty about using him. She couldn't make any promises, and she'd found someone who wasn't asking for them. He slept with Cassandra and she knew he didn't even like her, he didn't need things to be meaningful. And when he had left, she had been confused, and missed having him there, but she knew now that was more from habit. Habit, and not wanting to have to start over with someone else.

Above all, even without the rest of what she now knew, Brody would always have been easy to dump when Finn came back to her.

She hadn't meant that, of course. Not intentionally. Just like she hadn't meant to try to make Finn jealous, that was petty and she thought she had grown out of that. But on some level she had tried to move on quickly both to prove to herself that she could (_a total failure_) and to show Finn that he couldn't just leave and expect he could come back when he felt like it. And it had worked like that with Jesse, the threat of losing her had always made Finn shape up before, given him motivation. Not this time, though, he'd been too hurt himself, though he had also been so sure she was still his anyway. His cockiness about his hold on her, simultaneously so hot and so annoying. Because in that case how could he leave her and think for a moment that she wouldn't be broken by it?

Even now, she couldn't regret having broken up with him when she did. Many other things, yes. But the soul-rending agony she had felt, when she had woken up to find him gone, that could not be borne. And still she did not know how to bear it, now that the bandage was torn off to show the wound still bleeding.

She had pretended so long not to be hurt, even pretended well enough to fool herself. But she was, still, still. Always, without Finn.

Their night together, that had been pretending of a different kind, snatching that one night for _them_ despite their separation, ignoring the pain on both sides, pretending that nothing else mattered but the two of them together. Allowing herself to live again, just for that night, letting her body say what her voice could not admit. Feeling his body move with hers, changed but still so very much him, so right, and their shared ecstasy made more passionate by their unacknowledged desperation, both knowing they had just that night to have what they could together before they had to return to their separate lives. Then kissing his head the next morning as she left early, Finn finally sleeping, while she tried to put her heart away again just as surely as she closed the hotel room door behind her.

And she failed, ultimately. Because she didn't have her heart, did she? It stayed with the sleeping man behind her, because it had always been his. But she tried to pretend she could carry on, because she didn't know what else to do. Her life, her future, it was in New York.

_That wasn't living_, part of her mind chimed in.

_I know, all right?_ She answered back. _I know now. But he isn't here, and I don't know what I can do. I can't be with him, but I can't build a life without him._

A song came unbidden into her head, and she winced as she recognized the music and the vocalist: Journey. That band played the soundtrack to their lives, it seemed. _True love won't desert you..._

She could carry on, she had to. And there was hope. After all, he did come all the way here, for her.

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_Please review!_


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